How should we coach when we find ourselves with shared experiences or mirroring behaviour? Can we maintain our connected separateness?
Lindsay Wittenberg
I’ve been thinking about how I bring myself to my client encounters, and factors that influence this. I’m reflecting on what’s emerging around ‘converging’ and ‘parallel’.
Some years ago I coached a talented senior woman who’d joined an organisation which was looking for ‘fresh blood’ from a different sector. Once there, she discovered how difficult it was to be different in an established culture. She struggled to maintain her identity and to live her personal values at work.
Her story reminded me of two times in my own career when the same had happened to me. I left both roles when the dissonance in values became intolerable.
As I coached this woman I was aware, on the one hand, of the possible interference of interpreting my own experience into this situation and, on the other, of the impact on her wellbeing. I struggled to maintain my connected separateness – my ability to be ‘with’ but not ‘in’ – and it took some effort to keep my focus on working with her on how she could thrive without my inappropriate converging or projection.
More recently I’ve found myself working with another successful senior leader, heading a team with a demanding and unrelentingly pressured agenda.
He struggles with holding to account those who are opaque in communicating their progress on tasks. He feels inhibited from delegating to them, compounded by lack of trust in the competence of team members who behave in this way. He tells me it’s because he hesitates to intrude on the individual’s preferred way of working.
He’s already said he doesn’t want to ‘explore his childhood’ or ‘get into therapy’, and I’m hesitant about going near emotions or psychological patterns, so I keep the coaching tactical and performance directed.
As I work with him, I become aware that just as he’s reluctant to intrude on the preferred working style of team members, so I’m cautious about taking him into territory he doesn’t want to go near or may be fearful of. This seems to be an unproductive parallel process: I’m recreating for myself the behaviours I’m witnessing in my client.
I turn to alternative behaviour the client might develop, and wonder if my enacting that could be useful role modelling. With uncharacteristic directiveness I find myself telling the client that giving away his own power and not holding his team member to account is both a risk and a disservice to the team member deprived of the opportunity to grow. It’s also a failure of leadership.
I realise my process more clearly after the session: I’ve engaged with the parallel process and consciously redirected it.
While the second example seems to me a clear case of parallel process, I haven’t totally resolved the first in my head: I need to avoid collusion, but what are the more subtle and complex lines around convergence? Now I’m wondering whether the philosophy of geometry might have anything to offer me.
Learning points
- Beware of not converging or projecting my experience into the client’s situation
- Maintain my connected separateness
- Equally, I’ve been aware of an unproductive parallel process – and have consciously redirected it
- While parallel process seems clear, what are the more subtle and complex lines around convergence?